The thing about stress is that there are good stressors and bad stressors. Certainly, stuff like bad bosses, unhealthy/unsafe work environment, lack of proper tools or training, etc. are stressors which can make for a hellish job.

But, there are good stressors, like diversity in the types of work assignments and demanding but not unrealistic deadlines can be stressors which can contribute to whether you love your job. Of course, one way of reducing stress in your job is to really know your job and keep an open mind to doing it.

If I had a nickel for eery "bookish" person who thought they would make a good librarian and dropped out of library school because of the reality of the profession...

Librarians have many careers paths at schools, colleges and universities, city/county funded libraries and in corporate research.

Really? Because every one of those sectors is cutting their library funding. Libraries in the US are faced with layoffs and diminishing service hours, because people think "any kid with an Internet connection can do it."

MEDIAN SALARY: $54,500

Where?

JOB OUTLOOK: 7%

Where?

JOBS RATED STRESS SCORE: 10.58

I'd love to know what that means.

TFA is an unmitigated crock.

What makes being a Librarian a great job is that it's a relatively pleasant working environment (indoors, heated/cooled) with generally intelligent and pleasant colleagues, in a profession where you feel great job satisfaction because you know you make a positive difference in someone's life, in some small way, every day. That makes it worth the low pay (relative to education required), the idiot patrons, the screaming children, the "my god, can the stakes get lower" politics, the incompetent IT (no good IT folks take Library salaries) and the constant assumption that being a librarian is like being a full-time library patron - all we do is read all day and relax - when the behind-the-scenes work that goes into making a Library run is incredibly time-consuming and specialized.

That said, I certainly wouldn't want to do anything else. I wouldn't have said that, though, when I was in private industry or University libraries. I only found my bliss when I went to work in Public Libraries.

Everyone else is pretty farked. We're graduating far more post-graduate/PhD students than there are open positions for, tuition have been skyrocketing, and enrollment is starting to decline as students are finally starting to realize 60-80k spent on an education isn't the free-ride to success they were lead to believe.

More and more Universities are bringing in adjunct professors. They have no benefits, no job security, worse pay, and no freedom - they just teach the class. Glorified high school substitute teachers really (and I say this as someone who has done it, so I mean no disrespect).

Well, I guess any job that pays less than $36k a year is going to seam low stress in comparison to the constant anxiety you must have knowing you may not be able to pay your next month's rent in the event any unforeseen expenses arise. So that covers about half the jobs listed.

As a junior tenure-track law prof, I completely concur with the list. Having just transitioned from big law, this feels like retirement. No undergrads, relatively light teaching load, and the freedom to write about whatever I want to without any boss to supervise me. Sure, I make a third of what I used to, but I'm insanely happy and relaxed.

valkore:Well, I guess any job that pays less than $36k a year is going to seam low stress in comparison to the constant anxiety you must have knowing you may not be able to pay your next month's rent in the event any unforeseen expenses arise. So that covers about half the jobs listed.

Is there even such a job? A machinist maybe, but if all you do is operate a drill press every day then you must be a low skilled laborer in a factory. I can think of nothing more stressful than doing the same repetitive task all day every day.

Back in air traffic control there was euphoric stress when you had everything ticking over just right. The bad sort of stress came from bosses.

As a used book dealer my main source of stress involves freeway drivers on cell phones in the center lane slowing down because they really can't talk and drive at the same time. Makes me wish I had a cow bumper so I could jam them up with a PIT maneuver.

Is there even such a job? A machinist maybe, but if all you do is operate a drill press every day then you must be a low skilled laborer in a factory. I can think of nothing more stressful than doing the same repetitive task all day every day.

No there is no such job. Lean manufacturing dictates work be done in "cells" with multiple machines working together to make a finished product. It reduces the waste caused by moving the part from location to location. While there are still drill presses, workers are trained to run multiple operations.

BigOle8point:loonatic112358: Cerebral Knievel: There are still drill press operators in the States?

Maybe in union shops?

NopeReapTheChaos: 10. Drill Press Operator.

Is there even such a job? A machinist maybe, but if all you do is operate a drill press every day then you must be a low skilled laborer in a factory. I can think of nothing more stressful than doing the same repetitive task all day every day.

No there is no such job. Lean manufacturing dictates work be done in "cells" with multiple machines working together to make a finished product. It reduces the waste caused by moving the part from location to location. While there are still drill presses, workers are trained to run multiple operations.

yep, that was one of the big bullshiat alerts reading that list. low paid manufacturing jobs are not low stress, and they really don't exist as such anymore. Most jobs like that were shipped out of country a while ago. I used to work in custom industrial machine engineering and manufacturing. erecting and installing industrial equipment like printing presses, laminaters, bottling lines, etc. I had to be a machinist, plumber, electrician, hydraulics and pneumatics tech.and PLC programmer.

I work in a brewery now as a Cellerman and packaging floor specialist.

Cerebral Knievel:yep, that was one of the big bullshiat alerts reading that list. low paid manufacturing jobs are not low stress, and they really don't exist as such anymore. Most jobs like that were shipped out of country a while ago. I used to work in custom industrial machine engineering and manufacturing. erecting and installing industrial equipment like printing presses, laminaters, bottling lines, etc. I had to be a machinist, plumber, electrician, hydraulics and pneumatics tech.and PLC programmer.I work in a brewery now as a Cellerman and packaging floor specialist.

the shop I worked out had a drill press, there wasn't anyone directly assigned to it

usually it was whatever low payed flunky that had tested out on it was available (frequently me)

Well, I guess any job that pays less than $36k a year is going to seam low stress in comparison to the constant anxiety you must have knowing you may not be able to pay your next month's rent in the event any unforeseen expenses arise. So that covers about half the jobs listed.

In all fairness, my favorite job was working at the golf course. Low stress, off-hours so no traffic, complete isolation, boss would give you a job and then leave, I was working tons of hours and losing tons of weight (40 pounds, 4 months).

Mind you, the pay was shiat and sometimes you had to do crap work in terrible weather, but looking back, I enjoyed that more than any job I've had since.

/Oh, and you had a built-in excuse to screw off. "Why yes, it took me 3 hours to do a 15 minute job because golfers."

loonatic112358:Cerebral Knievel: yep, that was one of the big bullshiat alerts reading that list. low paid manufacturing jobs are not low stress, and they really don't exist as such anymore. Most jobs like that were shipped out of country a while ago. I used to work in custom industrial machine engineering and manufacturing. erecting and installing industrial equipment like printing presses, laminaters, bottling lines, etc. I had to be a machinist, plumber, electrician, hydraulics and pneumatics tech.and PLC programmer.I work in a brewery now as a Cellerman and packaging floor specialist.

the shop I worked out had a drill press, there wasn't anyone directly assigned to it

usually it was whatever low payed flunky that had tested out on it was available (frequently me)

Though I also ran the chop saw and swept the floors

I too was that low payed flunkie. :D I worked everything, learned as much as I could and clawed my way up till I was the guy who usually got put on a plane with a belt full of pointy things to go fix broken stuff.

I work in the brewery now because of all that prior machinery experience.

The Brewery is a lot more stressful actually, In addition to regular cellar duties, I manage a crew of five men on the main packaging equipment and am responsible for the end quality of all those bottles which are distributed over three states and the District of Columbia. co-ordinating between the brewery.distributor liaison, brew-master, sales department, raw material suppliers etc.and of course the general care and feeding of the equipment itself.

Is there even such a job? A machinist maybe, but if all you do is operate a drill press every day then you must be a low skilled laborer in a factory. I can think of nothing more stressful than doing the same repetitive task all day every day.

There are some but in many places they have been replaced with automation. It just much cheaper and faster that way.

BigLuca:Benevolent Misanthrope: es librarian a welcoming career option for the bookish.

If I had a nickel for eery "bookish" person who thought they would make a good librarian and dropped out of library school because of the reality of the profession...

Do you ... do you really call it "library school"?

Yes. Usually "School [or College] of Library and Information Studies [or Science]" is the official name. But yes, we call it Library School, and our degree is Master of Library Science, or Master of Library and Information Science.

There's a movement afoot in some places to call it "I-School", after the "Information" part. I've always felt that was too apple-ish for me.

brandent:loonatic112358: Cerebral Knievel: There are still drill press operators in the States?

Maybe in union shops?

Yeah don't know. Never met one and never heard of a job called 'drill press operator'. Aren't most machinist jobs related to CNC and other technologically more advanced things?

And how exactly (other than pulling it straight from the nether regions) does drill press operator end up on any kind of list with librarian?

Oh no, drill press operator was very much at one time a job related to mass fabrication and it would have been a low paying manufacturing job. It would have entailed, standing at a drill press, and drilling out "X" amount of holes of the particular size of cutting tool that was in your press. then the widget would be passed on to the next guy who would be in charge of drilling out the next sized hole in the widget and down on the assembly line it goes.

that job has been replaced with CNC machines that can fabricte the entire widget itself, OR... farmed off to countries that pay slave wages for such an occupation.

there is really no such thing as a drill press operator anymore in the United states. A machinest would be close, but there is a vast difference between a machinist and a drill press operator. and a machinist nowadays is more likely to be the guy who operates the CNC machine. and by operating the machine, I mean loading the engineers program, mounting the material stock and hovering around the big red "OHshiat!" button

Cerebral Knievel:brandent: loonatic112358: Cerebral Knievel: There are still drill press operators in the States?

Maybe in union shops?

Yeah don't know. Never met one and never heard of a job called 'drill press operator'. Aren't most machinist jobs related to CNC and other technologically more advanced things?

And how exactly (other than pulling it straight from the nether regions) does drill press operator end up on any kind of list with librarian?

Oh no, drill press operator was very much at one time a job related to mass fabrication and it would have been a low paying manufacturing job. It would have entailed, standing at a drill press, and drilling out "X" amount of holes of the particular size of cutting tool that was in your press. then the widget would be passed on to the next guy who would be in charge of drilling out the next sized hole in the widget and down on the assembly line it goes.

that job has been replaced with CNC machines that can fabricte the entire widget itself, OR... farmed off to countries that pay slave wages for such an occupation.

there is really no such thing as a drill press operator anymore in the United states. A machinest would be close, but there is a vast difference between a machinist and a drill press operator. and a machinist nowadays is more likely to be the guy who operates the CNC machine. and by operating the machine, I mean

loading the engineers program, mounting the material stock and hovering around the big red "OHshiat!" button

Nailed it. What we used to call button pushers are CNC machinists now.

Though if you spend enough time pushing buttons and then looking at the screen, you're bound to learn some G or N-code.

I worked as a medical records tech. It may not have been very stressful, but it was completely miserable. It was a mundane, repetitive, mindless job that was little more than a low paying dead end. I don't see how there's much of a future with a position like that with electronic medical records being forced onto hospitals. The hospital I worked at replaced the entire department with an offsite subcontractor to handle the shift from paper records to electronic. I'm much happier and substantially better compensated now in my slightly more stressful and more enjoyable job.

Benevolent Misanthrope:BigLuca: Benevolent Misanthrope: es librarian a welcoming career option for the bookish.

If I had a nickel for eery "bookish" person who thought they would make a good librarian and dropped out of library school because of the reality of the profession...

Do you ... do you really call it "library school"?

Yes. Usually "School [or College] of Library and Information Studies [or Science]" is the official name. But yes, we call it Library School, and our degree is Master of Library Science, or Master of Library and Information Science.

There's a movement afoot in some places to call it "I-School", after the "Information" part. I've always felt that was too apple-ish for me.

Interesting. I mean I understand what the job entails because I saw the Noah Wyle movie, but it didn't cover some of that.

As a used book dealer my main source of stress involves freeway drivers on cell phones in the center lane slowing down because they really can't talk and drive at the same time. Makes me wish I had a cow bumper so I could jam them up with a PIT maneuver.